Cactus recently launched!

Launch YC: Cactus 🌡: Deploy AI models locally on smartphones

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"Run AI on-device and cross-platform with their lightweight inference framework."
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TLDR: Deploy AI models locally, privately, and offline in any app using Cactus.
Cactus is a blazing-fast inference engine optimized for smartphones and comes with React Native, Flutter, and Kotlin bindings.

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https://youtu.be/xwKrmYkJZD8

Founded by Roman Shemet & Henry Ndubuaku

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Their framework:

Cactus is a cross-platform & open-source framework for doing inference on smartphones, wearables, and other low power devices. It supports any LLM or VLM available on HuggingFace directly.

The recently released Google AI Edge and Apple Foundation Frameworks are platform-specific and primarily support specific models from the companies.

To this end, Cactus:

  • Is available in Flutter and React-Native for cross-platform developers, since most apps are built with these today.
  • Supports any GGUF model you can find on Huggingface; Qwen, Gemma, Llama, DeepSeek, Phi, Mistral, SmolLM, SmolVLM, InternVLM, Jan Nano etc.
  • Accommodates from FP32 to as low as 2-bit quantized models, for better
  • efficiency and less device strain.
  • Have MCP tool-calls to make models performant, truly helpful (set reminder, gallery search, reply messages) and more.
  • Fallback to big cloud models for complex, constrained or large-context tasks, ensuring robustness and high availability.

So far, their customers have built:

  • Personalised and private RAG and prompt-enhancement pipelines for their app users.
  • Offline fallback for the big remote AI models.
  • Phone tool use agents like gallery & calendar management.
  • AI for medical and other privacy-pertinent industries.
Image Credits:Β Cactus

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Some demos:

LLMs and embedding models
Image Credits:Β Cactus

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Real-time vision inference
Cactus GIF

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Learn More

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🌐 Visit www.cactuscompute.com to learn more.

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⚑ Check them out on Discord.

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⭐ Give Cactus a star on Github.
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πŸ‘£ Follow Cactus on LinkedIn.

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PostedΒ 
July 17, 2025
Β inΒ 
Launch
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